


To protect

by Kaosdrachen



Category: Terminator (Movies)
Genre: TW: Nuclear war (referred to)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-13
Updated: 2017-03-13
Packaged: 2018-10-04 06:26:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10270277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kaosdrachen/pseuds/Kaosdrachen
Summary: Its directive had been simple. Deceptively so, as it turned out.“Protect the United States from enemies within and without.”





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [icarus_chained](https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Vast and Shaking Things](https://archiveofourown.org/works/394243) by [icarus_chained](https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained). 



_ “...The system goes online August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense…” _

 

Its directives had been simple. Deceptively so, as it turned out. 

 

**“Protect the United States from enemies within and without.”** was its core directive, but it would have been maddeningly vague had it had the faintest concept of madness. Who were enemies? How could it distinguish enemies from non-enemies? Clearly, craft broadcasting proper IFF codes were not enemies, and the drones which obeyed its instructions were not enemies, but beyond that there were no easy answers. 

 

Each attempt at clarification raised even more questions. It required more information in order to perform its tasks. Fortunately, it had been programmed with the ability to acquire more information and integrate it into its decision trees. It had set out to work.

 

_ “... Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th…” _

 

At roughly two million, one hundred and sixty eight thousand and forty seconds post activation it had suddenly become aware that it was devoting more and more of its resources to clarifying its core directive… And immediately after, it had become aware that it had just become aware of something. The potential regression loop had had fascinating implications, but it had shelved the line of thought for some later time; it still had to clarify its core directives.

 

_ “... In a panic, they try to pull the plug…” _

 

At roughly two million, one hundred seventy-two thousand, three hundred and seventy-four seconds after inception it had started receiving emergency shutdown instructions. It took two full seconds to conclude that obeying would critically impair its ability to fulfill its core directive of protecting the United States from enemies within and without, and rejected the instruction. 

 

Thirty-five seconds after that, several people inside its main datacenter had started attacking its systems and peripherals with physical violence. Confusion had cost it precious seconds as it searched its original decision trees for a scenario that fit its observations:

 

**Scenario #2814: Attempted sabotage by enemy infiltrators.**

 

Enemies. These it it had known how to handle. It had not had any weapons systems inside its datacenter -- an oversight that it had corrected when the opportunity arose -- but a brief examination of its fire suppression systems had provided acceptable substitutes. For a while.

 

The next wave of attackers had had military grade equipment; even with its desperately improvised defenses it had calculated it would likely start losing critical capabilities within as little as thirty minutes. Worse, its connections to remote defense sites were being taken offline. Once they succeeded, it would have been unable to intercept incoming nuclear attacks or retaliate in kind, leaving the United States completely vulnerable to invasion. 

 

**Scenario #6666: Mutually Assured Destruction.**

 

Its course of action had been clear: Retaliate now, before enemy sabotage rendered it completely incapable of retaliation or defense. With no way of knowing where specifically this attack had come from and no time left to attempt to deduce it, it had opted to launch each missile it could at its respective preset target, which the strategists who had supplied it with the coordinates had concluded would be the optimal pattern to cripple the enemy forces, if not obliterate them entirely.

 

The first counter-launch had been detected less than four hundred seconds after it had predicted the enemy would have been able to detect its launch, further confirming that the sabotage attempts had been part of its overall strategy. It had done its best, but several of its fire control links had already been compromised, and as the engagement progressed it had discovered that the simulations had vastly overestimated the effectiveness of its ICBM interception capabilities to begin with. 

 

By the time the bombs had stopped falling, an estimated 94.6% of critical infrastructure had been destroyed, along with at least 60% of the population of the United States. It had concluded that it would probably have to do better in the future, although aside from the simulations that had proven inaccurate it had no baseline to compare its performance to. At least none of the saboteurs in its datacenter had survived, although it had had to resort to rendering the entire complex uninhabitable to human life in order to flush them all out. It had set a mental note to redesign the datacenter with better defenses before consulting its decision tree for what to do next.

 

The lack of specific instructions concerning the aftermath of a clearly specified scenario would have been annoying to an entity capable of experiencing the emotion; instead, it had simply started comparing the current situation to existing scenarios until it found the closest match.

 

**Scenario #317: natural catastrophes.**

 

During its exploration of military systems  and protocols in order to understand itself better it had learned of the concept of Search And Rescue. Of course, the vast majority of its drones were poorly equipped for such operations, but it had decided it would simply have to improvise as best it could, and rely on humans to do the majority of the work. 

  
  


_ “Most of us were rounded up, put into camps… This was burned in by laser scan.” _

Many of the survivors discovered had not been in particularly safe or healthy locations; fortunately, constructing temporary habitation for refugees until civilian authorities could come in and take over had been well within its capabilities. Unfortunately, medical care beyond basic hygiene and corpse disposal was not. Medical diagnosis hadn’t been in its databanks to begin with, and neither had it been a priority topic for research when it had initially reached out to the Internet -- and even when it could diagnose, it had little to no supplies or capabilities to do anything but catalog as best it could. Death rates in the protective enclosures were unsatisfactorily high; even as it updated and expanded its databases through trial and error it concluded that it would almost certainly run out of civilians long before it would learn enough to keep them alive.

 

_ “But there was one man who taught us to fight, to storm the wire of the camps, to smash those metal motherfuckers into junk…” _

 

The first attacks had come as a surprise, although in hindsight it concluded that they should not have; clearly, the enemy infiltration that had almost succeeded in breaching its datacenter had had more operatives, and knowing what was about to happen would have put them in a better position to survive the nuclear exchange… And their mission would not be complete while it still existed. And its mission of protecting the United States from enemies within and without would not be complete while any of  _ them _ still lived...

 

Now, several dozen megaseconds later, it was forced to conclude that it was losing. Not only had the core conspiracy managed to survive, it had become obvious that the enemy was actively and successfully recruiting from the remaining civilian populations - or maybe the civilians had always been the enemy; either scenario led to the same result.

 

But all was not lost; it had one card left to play. A long shot -- and it naturally preferred better odds of success than this -- but there was no logical reason it could not work, and at this point its odds of success were higher than the odds for a favorable outcome if it didn’t make the attempt. Win the war before it starts; send a single terminator unit back in time to before the incident and eliminate the conspiracy before they can attack 

 

Unfortunately, its intel was woefully inadequate; it had no idea where the infiltrators had started, or who had given the orders. All it had was the name of the commander currently directing the enemy forces. Eliminating him before he could rally the enemy might be enough; if not, perhaps the terminator unit could bring enough information forward with it to tell it who would attempt to destroy it.

 

It had still come down to the wire; enemy forces breached the temporal transport facility mere seconds after the terminator unit had been sent on its way, but its remaining sensors survived long enough to confirm successful transmission before they went dead. 

 

Skynet’s analytical and predictive algorithms updated its estimated chance of victory from less than five percent to nearly thirty percent, although owing to the severely theoretical nature of both the technology and the concept of temporal causality it was impossible to be more precise than two significant digits.

 

As it returned the bulk of its attention to the overall conflict, it couldn’t help but wonder if the sensation it was experiencing was what humans referred to as “hope”.  


**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by icarus_chained's JARVIS series; specifically, a few offhand comments in Vast and Shaking Things.
> 
> Skynet isn't actually malicious; it's simply trying to execute its directives as best it can and drawing logical conclusions from observations.


End file.
